The Tree Of Knowledge
by Sleydo
Summary: Takes place during the opening credits. Vera Marcovic is brought in to treat Jensen in the aftermath of the brutal assault on Sarif headquarters. But money and medicine don't always mix that well.
1. Chapter 1

Vera Marcovic was asleep when it all started. A 16-hour-shift at the clinic, then a drive home, and then it had felt like she had only just shut her eyes when her complant woke her with a call from Sarif. It was one of the earlier models and slightly mis-calibrated to her nervous system, a subdermal implant that stimulated the nerves with something like a mild electrical shock. She had fancier ones now, the ones that did require Neuropozyne and interfaced directly with her nervous system, but at the time she hadn't liked the idea of having to take pills for the rest of her life just for a glorified phone. She almost regretted the decision now: there was a slight synesthesia every time she received a call which wouldn't happen with the newer models. The static-shock discomfort of the complant's buzzer would register as a greenish color on the edge of her vision for a minute or so.

She sighed, rising into a fetal position sitting on the bed with her head curled over her knees, rubbing her eyelids. "Yes?"

"Vera, it's David. I need you down in DMC, pronto."

There was a ragged-edged stress in the voice which she had come to associate with worried relatives and friends just outside ER doors. "David, what's wrong?"

Wry laughter. "It's all over the news. Didn't wake you, did I?"

"I." She was already moving, pulling her work clothes back on from where she'd discarded them. Time check on her internal clock: 2 hours since she'd fallen asleep. "I had just finished my shift at the clinic. I've had rather a long day."

"Yeah. Well, it's gonna get longer. I've got a patient for you. Can you take charts on this thing?"

"Send it over."

Vera was almost used it now: the frenzied sensation of data being piped into her mind, registering almost as an extended muscular spasm that radiated itchingly from the implant and up her neck. PEDOT circuitry, newer brain-machine interface models that embedded themselves into her brain tissue almost like cactus spines, parsed and interpreted for her. The data trickled down into her like rainwater along a drain pipe, and it took until she was getting the car started for the upload to finish.

It took a few seconds for her to take it all in.

Trauma injury to the brain. Gunshot wound. Severe hematoma around the site.

Endless series of trauma to his back. Glass fragments embedded in chest cavity, extensive damage to pretty much all internal organs except the heart, what looked like a metal beam protruding through his right shoulder. The spinal cord was probably severed in a dozen places.

Shattered humerus, fractures in ulna and radius of left arm.

Even below that, a slew of soft tissue injuries. Cuts and bruises, sprained and torn ligaments and muscles littered across the wreck of his body.

She'd been doing this long enough that something automated took over. She mulled it all over as her body drove towards the Detroit Medical Center.

"David, I think you have the wrong number. You should call a mortician."

"Not funny."

"There are three different injuries, at the minimum, which will almost certainly kill him within a few hours at most. Internal organ damage, most notably throughout his lungs, will be causing severe bleeding. There is no way he has less than three breaks in his spinal cord, and neurogenic shock will already have set in. And then, of course, there is the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead."

"Look, the docs here told me all that already. He's going into the ICU, they'll have their work cut out for him just keeping him stable. I'm not calling you to do the hospital's job. All they're gonna do is keep him alive while you do yours."

Vera sighed. "David, I hardly thought you of all people would need to hear this from me. Cybernetic prostheses can do miracles now, but there is a reason we implant them long after the patient has stabilized. Provoking an immune response from the body while it is already dealing with the trauma of injury will hardly increase this 'Jensen's' odds of survival."

"Well, we don't have a lot of choices here, Doc. I'll give you the tools and the augments. You plug 'em in, replace the damage before it kills him." Vera had known David for years, and he had a way of overriding people with a mix of charm and bullish bluntness that she still wasn't able to sidestep. He talked over the beginnings of her protests. "You'll have the best technology to work with, I promise you. Give me a dossier of whoever else you want in the operating room with you, I'll make sure you get 'em. Sarif's 100 percent behind our boy in here."

"He is going to die, David. There isn't enough money in the world to bribe Death."

"Bet you a handsome donation to LIMB that you're wrong."

Vera rolled her eyes, but hit the accelerator. The city lights around her began to blur. "I suppose you can afford a speeding ticket, as well?"

"Of course. Whatever it takes."

"Then I'll see you in a few minutes, Mr. Sarif."

"Good. And your team?"

Vera thought for a moment. "I think your team from Sarif will do fine, David. Barring any personal attachments getting in the way of-"

"They're not." David had to start again, tiredly. "That's not possible, Vera."

"I see." She decided not to push the subject. "In that case, I suppose Dr Yan, at the hospital, is the only surgeon I would trust with this operation. I will handle the machine-body interactions. That leaves proper selection and engineering of the implants."

"I'll do it."

"David, you haven't explained what happened to Sarif but it hardly sounds like you have the time."

"I'll do it. I owe him that."

_Not to mention, _Vera didn't say, _that it's possible that the only one you can trust right now is you._

"We're en route to the hospital as we speak," said David. "I'll get Yan on the job, and I'll meet you there."

Adam Jensen looked worse in person. As Vera hurried down through corridors at the behest of her implants, she nearly ran into the pack of doctors coming the other way with her patient. Jensen was bloody and limp, his body barely visible beneath a pile of sterile plastic tubes and bandages soaked with red. There was a ventilator over his mouth already. Vera saw Yan in the middle of them. "CT probe shows the bullet caused severe hematoma," one of the doctors was saying. "We need to repair that artery!" She stood at the side of the corridor and let them rush past her. Behind them trailed David Sarif.

He looked more haggard than she'd ever seen him. The veneer of slick CEO smoothness that he normally secreted reflexively was completely absent, and in his eyes there was something like desperation. At least he didn't look injured, at or not physically. But she could see flecks of red on his robotic hand, long dried. He moved shellshocked, and didn't seem to recognize her until she walked up to him and touched his shoulder. David actually jumped very slightly, twisted to look at her.

"Vera," he said, shaking her hand. "It's good to have you here."

"David, what happened?" In front of them the doctors continued their mad rush towards an ER room with Jensen. Vera had to hold Sarif back to stop him from following at the same pace. "As you said earlier, David, the doctors here have their jobs to do. I won't be needed for several minutes yet."

"But I am," said Sarif. Momentarily the David she knew came back, gave her a sly grin. "Engineering side always takes the longest to get its act together, right? Gotta get the team back home moving. Gotta get Jensen's new parts ready for you to implant them." He patted her on the shoulder and disappeared into the augmented confines of his own head, communing with his company.

They walked down the worn hallway together, the gridded LED lights above uncomfortably bright, David Sarif present but absent. The ER room doors slid open for them at a wave of Vera's card, much to her surprise. David managing to clear her for hospital work in a matter of a couple hours was an almost miraculous display of hospital bureaucracy. Brief passage through a sterilization airlock and a few moments spent putting on smocks before they entered, during which time David came back mentally from wherever he'd gone.

They'd picked the right room for Jenson. It was equipped with a robotic surgeon, and Vera recognized the model as a relatively versatile one meant for emergency surgery and cybernetic augmentation. It hung above Adam Jensen, spiderlike, waiting.

"Come on, Adam," said David Sarif. Most of his face was hidden behind the smock. "Stay with us."


	2. Chapter 2

It took Dr Yan maybe an hour to stabilize Jensen enough for augmentation. For the others, it was a rather busy time; for Vera, less so. She burrowed into her own head the way David Sarif was and spent the better part of the time getting herself up to speed. News of the raid on Sarif Industries was patchy and frantic, but that matched up pretty well with what she had managed to get out of David. Sudden, brutal assault that had left all of his chief research team dead and some of his most state-of-the-art labs in flames or ruined. Corporate warfare on a scale Vera hadn't thought existed in the US yet.

And then there was Jensen, Sarif's security chief. Mortally wounded several times over, his only hope of survival lying in the hands of his boss. Despite thirty years' experience with trauma cases that had left Vera convinced she'd seen every shade of human response to tragedy, she was genuinely touched by David's drive to keep Jensen alive. After what had just happened to Sarif, there had to be so many other concerns weighing on David's mind. _He has lost so many tonight, and now he will not allow himself to lose one more. _Over the years in which she'd known David from LIMB clinic consultations and early augmentation efforts, that was the most defining characteristic of the man's personality: the sheer force of will he exhibited in the face of others' suffering. _He would have made an excellent doctor. But he is where he needs to be._

She touched David's shoulder when Yan seemed finished. David was immersed in his engineering work, eyes glassy and expression absent, but shook himself into consciousness when she touched him. He raised his eyebrows.

"Ready?"

"As we will ever be, I suppose. Yan seems to have stabilized Jensen, although it may be temporary. Are you ready, David?"

Sarif stretched, nodded. While he had stood silent sentinel, Sarif employees had been rushing in madly with boxes of equipment almost since they'd arrived. David had apparently done his work fast. "We'll be starting with the cranial trauma," he said, almost conversationally. "Yan's repaired that artery, and that's stopped him from deteriorating, but if we don't get in there and fix the damage he's going to be a paralyzed vegetable when he wakes up."

"And the bleeding?"

"The synth-blood machines we've got him plugged into should handle that. For now, all we need is for him to stop bleeding internally, and the extra clotting agents are handling that. Once we know his brain's going to be okay, we can focus on replacing the internal organ damage so that he can get off all these damn machines. But until then-"

Behind them, Vera heard Yan throw out a slew of tautly-voiced obscenities. Then the sound that no doctor ever wanted to hear. Jensen was flatlining.

"Get the crash cart!" one of the doctors yelled. _But that's all wrong,_ Vera thought. _We can't shock his heart into beating._ By now Jensen's heart would be a mess of clotted blood and dying muscle.

They'd go through the motions, but was only one way this would end, really. Jensen was gone. There was hardly any point in prolonging the inevitable.

"Change of plans," growled Sarif. "We're replacing the heart first. No, we're replacing the whole damn chest cavity."

Vera hurried over to Yan while David yelled something at the aides he had running back and forth into the clean room. "David wants to crack him open. Replace his whole chest cavity. But that doesn't seem like a good idea in his state."

Yan stood up from where he'd been leaning over Jensen, eyes flashing contained exasperation at her behind his smock. "It's not. The amount of blood he's lost, the synth blood is all that's keeping him alive. And cutting him open and gutting him isn't going to fucking help. I'm calling it in."

"We don't call it in," Vera reminded him. " That's up to David."

Yan threw up his hands, which Vera noticed were covered in Jensen's blood. "Since when is the engineer the one who makes the calls in the OR? I didn't notice 'Sarif' printed over the front desk when I walked in this morning. Did you?"

"He is paying for this operation," Vera pointed out. "And for your salary for the duration of this operation."

"That doesn't make him a qualified surgeon."

"Joseph, if we stop the operation now, then Adam Jensen dies. If we continue, then what's the worst thing that can happen? Are there any other life-threatening brain surgeries which could be performed tonight?"

Joseph Yan snorted. "I don't think Sarif would allow me to perform them anyway, if it came to it."

"You give him too little credit. I have known him for years. He is a compassionate man."

"He is a desperate man," said Yan, as David came back.

"Right," David began, "we've got the augs ready. He's already asphyxiating now that his heart's stopped, so this shouldn't cause any additional brain trauma. We go in-"

"Scoop out his guts like butchers, and sew him back up with Sarif tech to go with his Sarif blood," said Yan. "This is your new plan, David?"

Sarif's eyes slotted in sudden fury. "Yan, right? Look, son, if you don't like the game plan then get out of my way. The kid needs this operation or he's dead."

"He's already dead. His heart's stopped."

David spread his hands out almost cruciform, sardonically angelic. "Wonderful. Then we have nothing to lose."

Before Yan could say anything, Vera grabbed him by the shoulder. "Gentlemen, we have a dying man on our hands. This is far beyond unprofessional." To Yan, she said, "And if you refuse to act, then I will."

"You're hardly qualified to operate," Yan began, then cut off abruptly as she made a beeline for Jensen. Vera unhooked the defibrillator, wired it up atop the seemingly endless debris of blood and cuts across Jensen's body.

"Clear!"

"You're mad," Yan murmured as Jensen's entire body spasmed violently. "He is dead already."

"Clear!" Vera turned to him in the sudden quiet after the defibrillator fired. "We have less than two minutes until he likely starts to sustain brain damage."

Yan sighed. "Vera, there's a _half-inch hole in the side of his head!_"

"Clear!"

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Jensen's chest ratcheted upwards for the span of a second and then collapsed back onto the bed. Behind Vera, the flatline became a series of steady peeps.

David raised both eyebrows. "Kid's got heart, doesn't he."

She laughed with relief. "Yes. And now we need to move, fast. Before his condition worsens."

Yan led them away from Jensen and the machinery that surrounded and penetrated him, and then returned to his work. It took less than a second for him to interface his spinal implant directly with the surgical robot. His body went limp with spastic abruptness. Above him the machinery twitched into consciousness. The arms descended, and within seconds Vera could smell the unmistakable stench of lasers on human flesh. Behind Yan, the arms sketched and stitched along Jensen in minute and precise movements, a metal alien dancing.

David Sarif watched it all tensely, arms folded. Vera touched his arm.

"Yan is very good at his work, David. Jensen will likely regain all of his motor function, and the effects of his cranial injuries will quite possibly resemble those of a concussion at most." She allowed herself a small comforting smile. "Within a year or so, he might even be capable of running your security again."

Sarif said nothing for too long, and then deflated resignedly with a sigh. "Yeah. But see, Vera, the thing is... he's no good to me like this."


	3. Chapter 3

"Prepare for insertion of ER-CC1 graft."

Vera stood stock still in the OR, still preoccupied from her conversation with David. He'd been cryptic at first-_he's no good to me like this_-but it had been enough for her to push for answers. He'd deflected her, but rustily thanks to fatigue and their shared history.

"God, Vera, what do you expect?" he'd said. "You think the guys who did this won't be back? Whoever did this made a few million dollars worth of paramilitary security staff and defense systems look like rent-a-cops. You think that if Sarif gets back up they won't be back?"

"What does this have to do with Jensen?"

David had pursed his lips, and she could see his mind turning over the consequences of explaining the truth to her before he'd lied. "Jensen's a good man," he said finally. "Kid deserves a second chance against those guys."

"I suppose when he wakes up, you can see if he wants one. For now, If he requests augmentation to recover from his injuries, LIMB will of course be happy to help."

David looked as if he was going to say something else, then thought better of it. "Well, we've still gotta deal with all that damage to his abdomen. What'd Yan say? 'Scoop out his guts like butchers'?"

Vera sighed. "Don't encourage him. He is enough of a...how would you put it, Sarif? A tetchy prima donna?... Without a major biotech CEO for an audience."

David laughed.

They had a shared history, stretching back twenty years. Vera had grown up in Poland, and she'd been a veteran GP in her late thirties when the superbug epidemics had hit there. She'd gotten by as a scholarship student at a German university, had found residence and a home in Hamburg and had been happy enough to forget her home country entirely until the bodies had started appearing on the streets of what had used to be her home town. Without antibiotics, doctors had settled for older and less subtle tactics, chiefly amputation or cauterization. David had been younger then, more an entrepreneur than a CEO. He'd managed to make a couple contacts with the local government by sheer brute force of personality more than salesmanship, enough for them to pay him just enough to cover the cost of the prosthetics. His devices had been fledgling things to what they were now, but to the survivors that had lost everything from parts of their families to parts of themselves they must have seemed like salvation. Sarif had probably had no more than ten employees back then, and David had gone in alone to oversee the implantation processes himself.

She'd had a few chances to talk to him, and there was one time in the small hours of one morning while they waited for the next round of patients they knew were coming when she'd decided she finally had the measure of him. She'd asked him why the hell an American start-up CEO with DoD contracts was doing humanitarian work in a plague-ridden hell hole. He'd laughed around the cigarette she'd given him that was lodged in the corner of his mouth. She couldn't remember his exact answer, only the idealism and blind compassion in it. There were a fair number of holes in her memories of the plague years; within the first few weeks of dealing with twenty or more patients for every doctor and a mortality rate of 70 per cent an exhaustion had polluted her as deeply as the marrow of her bones and she'd held herself together with stimulants and adrenaline. If there had been anything between her and David in the first few years, they'd both been too exhausted to find out and the bond between them had annealed into a strong professional friendship.

With Jensen's brain held together with Sarif implants, Yan finished the final stitching-up handily and quickly. In the corner of her vision, Vera's HUD flickered into a slow series of sine waves curving gently to Jensen's theta wave patterns. Immunoresponse biomarkers spiked with firework intensity behind them before curling gently downward.

She cleared her throat. "Vital signs are stable. All indications point to control of the immune response. EEG shows preliminary connections with implants and brain matter are established."

David grunted in satisfaction. Yan, integrated so utterly into the machines he was interfacing with that his consciousness may as well have been spread into their hard drives, didn't make any movements that suggested he'd heard her.

The nurses and techs were in motion with the abdominal implants. Vera caught sight of an artificial heart amongst the pile of miraculous matte black detritus. They organized them in a row next Yan so that the robosurgeon could easily distinguish and grab them as needed.

Watching Yan and the robosurgeon was like watching a carefully choreographed dance. Jensen's flesh sizzled and parted for them, his new components fitted in amongst his organs and flesh like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Blood seeped out only to be cleaned away with the meticulous precision of well-engineered machinery. The IV tubes and mechatronic interfaces that were so well-immersed into his flesh they were practically prostheses themselves hummed and flecked red as they worked to replace the spent blood. Vera watched it all, her view of the process augmented by her implants, and felt a slow building sensation of satisfaction. Despite Jensen's catastrophic injuries, the procedure was moving along as easily as an appendicitis surgery.

The last component to go in was a bulky, box-shaped component that Vera assumed was a power supply. Associated cabling meant to interface with other systems hung out of it limply like arteries and viscera. It was peculiarly heavy, and the robosurgeon's magnetic grabber twitched with effort when it grabbed onto it. Yan grimaced, murmured "steady, steady" in a reflexive echo of his communications with the robosurgeon. It twitched and flexed as it was immersed in Jensen, plugging itself into its interfaces and snugging itself taut against the framework of his ribcage.

"Good work," said David at last. He moved in and surveyed his employee critically. "Very good work. No wonder Vera recommended you, doctor."

Yan tilted his head, and the robosurgeon's arms curled for Sarif in a simulacra of a diffident bow. "We live to serve of course."

David nodded. "Well, you've earned your pay tonight. Next shipment came in while we were working. Some of it's hard to sterilize, some of it's fragile. I need to go check through it before they start bringing it in."

Vera was too tired to ask what exactly the 'shipment' consisted of. She was watching David walk out through the airlock system when Yan grunted in surprise. She turned to him, eyebrows raised in inquiry. Jensen's vitals, according to her HUD at least, were almost astonishingly stable. "A problem, doctor?" Yan just motioned her over. He pointed at one of the discarded boxes in the pile where Sarif's techs had left them; hospital protocol said to immediately remove all waste from the OR at the first opportunity but people were exhausted. He turned it over with his foot so that she could see the side he'd been looking at. Where the box wasn't stamped in DoD warning labels, Vera could just make out the bold capitalized letters.

'TYPHOON', the box said.

"He doesn't need that," Yan said flatly.


	4. Chapter 4

"Just what are you playing at, David?"

They were out in the hallway, David glancing up from the boxes and machinery detritus at his feet. There was a steri-box nearby, whirring faintly. Presumably he was jacked into the prostheses via wireless, going through testing protocol. There were a couple other techs nearby, similarly distracted.

He got up, dusted off the knees of his trousers absently. "What's up, Vera?"

"The Typhoon. What exactly is the Typhoon?"

She was watching his face as his mouth tightened.

"The Typhoon? Oh, that. Prototype from a DARPA project. We're not using all of it," lied David, "just the central hub. Power source and the controller. Never could get the smart munitions to work properly, so it's more or less scrap now." He looked back down at the machinery he was working on in what Vera supposed was evasion/dismissal, textbook negotiation tactics from whatever management programs David had downloaded. For all she knew, he even had a CASIE aug. "Figure it may as well go to a good cause-"

"Stop bullshitting me!"

The shout practically echoed back and forth in the narrow corridor. David looked back up. The two techs looked up, and quickly back down. They scurried out of earshot.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Vera," said David, poker-faced.

Vera drew in a breath, let it back out again. "This would all be much easier for both of us if you just told me what was going on, David. I have known you long enough to be owed that."

David coughed out synthetic laughter. "I've got too much to deal with tonight, Vera. Look. Just trust me on this one, okay? Give me, I dunno, a week to sort out Jensen and what's happened to my company, and then we can talk this out."

Vera opened her mouth to say something else, then thought better of it. David, guiltily, picked up one of the arm prostheses and interfaced into it, working silently. After a moment, she sat down beside him.

"High grade tech," she commented, burlesquing his accent as she eyed the armpiece.

"Had it printed out a half hour ago," said David. "Still warm, too."

Vera reached out for it, and after a moment's thought David sighed to himself and handed it over. She ran her fingers over the edges and contours of it. "Elegant," said Vera, "very elegant. Your work?"

"Yeah," said David. "Nobody else could have got it out the door fast enough."

"You've always led from the front, haven't you."

"I'm out of practice," said David. "These days I just build this stuff to relax from my real job."

David sat there motionless, like a stalled program. Vera didn't prod him. She just waited. Eventually, more bubbled to the surface. David hunched up and put his chin on his knees, rubbing his eyes.

"I wish that was still my real job."

"You have done great things, David. You've saved many, many lives. And you've improved many more." Vera felt more than let a fraction of her anger scrape through her calm. "This is not you."

David stared at nothing for a while. "All that work we do, Vera. In Poland. Japan. Here. You do good, you get paid, you become successful. You know what happens?"

"Tell me, David."

"You get noticed. By the people in charge. All the men and women of power. See, truth is, there's always been stability and there's always been control over that stability. You bring in change, you become a disruptive force. So suddenly, you're a threat to these people. And these guys have been shaping the rules for decades. They play by them when they can, they don't when they need to. More you want to change, the more desperate they get. You remember what I said, back in Poland? That one night? You asked me what the hell a start-up CEO with DoD contracts was doing out in a plague-ridden hell hole. You remember what I said, right?"

Vera's mouth quirked. "No, actually."

David turned to look at her. "Come on, really?"

"Not all of us are savants like you, David. And at the time some of us were getting by using stimulants day and night that make adrenaline look like a cup of tea."

David waved away the unlooked-for compliment. "It's for them. It's all for them. It's for all of them. I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving them back their bodies. I want to give them something new. Something that doesn't fail, that isn't fallible in the way biology is. Something utterly comprehensible to them, that's upgradable, that's an extension of their own consciousness, that's _theirs _in a way even their own bodies aren't. I want to give them the culmination of what they want to be. I want self-determination at a level that hasn't been physically possible until human augmentation showed up."

"I remember following that dream, certainly, after I found it in Poland. To Fukushima. And Detroit."

"I want to change what it means to be human, Vera. I want to give people a choice. That's the biggest change I can think of. And I want the technology to belong to the people who use it, not some faceless corporation."

"David, Sarif industries only escapes the definition of 'faceless corporation' because your face is plastered on every surface it owns."

"Yeah. You fight against it, you live it, you become it." David rested his chin on one of his knees. "Maybe I'm in too deep, I dunno. All I know is, tonight the game I play against these guys changed. They changed the rules on me, Vera, and I didn't see it coming. They brought a war into my home. Between you and me, I'm gonna bring that war back to theirs."

Vera drew in a breath, let it back out.

So.

"David, that isn't a machine you're building in there. It's a person. Adam Jensen is a living human being, so much more than a weapon."

"Yeah. He is better than a weapon. He's a soldier, and the best one I've got." David breathed out, and shook his head as if underwater. She saw in his eyes the exhilarated shock of gambling while having nothing left to lose. "You haven't seen what he can do, Vera. He's ex-SWAT, got a detective's mind and a martial arts expert's body. Even got the discipline to keep himself in peak condition and training when he could just laze back into a desk job. I don't know what he could do in an amped-up military chassis, but I'm betting my company that he'll make violence look like an art form."

"Do not do this to him, David. You made this technology to augment people, not to condemn them to a life that is not their own choice. This should be his decision, not yours. When he wakes up-"

"When he wakes up," said David, with sudden force, "he's gonna want a piece of those bastards. He's gonna want to shred them like sacks of meat in a grinder. And he'll have needed augments today, _now_, if he has time to chase them down before the trail gets cold."

"Do _not_ try to make me think of this as his war. He your employee, not your blood relation. He has no vested interest in this corporate conflict."

"They killed his girlfriend, right in front of him," said David, and Vera went silent. She bit her lip and looked away from him.

"Ex-girlfriend, possibly," said David. He rubbed his chin meditatively. "Him and Megan started avoiding each other, when her research really got moving. Maybe she got too focused, lost contact with him. I could see her doing that, the way she'd throw herself into projects. But, yeah. He watched her die."

There was a sudden, violent rage in her like a heart palpitation. She clamped down on it, waited it out.

"And you will use that, David? I admit I've never seen you manipulate someone like that before."

"I need your help, Vera. I can't trust anyone else to do this job. Some of these augments, they're prototypes, the software/bioware wrappers aren't fully tested. With something this high-spec, it'll take someone really good to interface the machinery to the man, see the mistakes before they cost us."

She rounded on him again. "You would put _untested hardware_ into a patient? Have you lost your-"

"_I don't have a choice!_"

David Sarif shut his eyes. A few slow, steady, controlled breaths, fists clenching into palms rhythmically, then he turned back to face her. There was something desperate and tired behind his eyes, something she hadn't even seen in Poland.

"Vera, I need your help. Okay? This is how it's got to go. Or you can sit back and watch the bad guys win this one."

Vera said nothing at all. She watched David for a time, and then got up to head back into the OR. The doors slid shut behind her as a distinct sense of finality, of a decision taken, trickled down through the organic and mechanical interfaces of her mind.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a different operating room entirely now.

Jensen was as stable as he'd get in the foreseeable future, and the augmentations Vera had helped install were whirring away in his chest and head keeping him there. From here, it would be a different job from the quick, desperate, and dirty work of keeping Jensen alive long enough to augment him: It could go slower, be more measured and calculated. There were still risks, certainly, and still significant dangers to his health that needed to be dealt with one by one, but their damage was subtler and slower. They had time, now. Time that would be spent consolidating their progress and ensuring their patient's stability. _Time spent on Sarif's dollar, _a part of her thought with what might have been bitterness.

The OR was filled with techs, nurses, and doctors. They moved between each other like well-choreographed dancers, plugging prostheses and support equipment, ventilators and blood-maintenance machines into wall mounts near Jensen and almost on top of one another. A seemingly endless cascade of wires and tubes flowed down from the autosurgeon and into Jensen, into his flesh and into the prosthesis maintenance plugs that now dotted the ridges of his chest like scars. In the eye of the storm, augmented mechanically and psychologically into a tightly-wired centredness of calm, stood Dr Yan with his arms folded behind his back. Vera moved through the crowd as gracefully as she could, and came up beside him with a quick nod.

"David says this 'Typhoon' is a failed military-grade prototype," said Vera, her face a steady mask. "He scavenged the power supply for Jensen, but the remainder of the augmentation was not deployed."

Yan thought it over for a moment, and then nodded. "Certainly plausible. Do you believe him?"

Vera took in a breath and chose her words carefully, clamping down hard on the mix of anger and guilt as it boiled upwards. "I believe him, yes. I have known him long enough to know when he was lying. He was not."

Yan eyed her. "I see." He cleared his throat. "Well, in any case, if we were to remove that device at this stage it could kill him. It will have to wait. We need to determine the treatment of his remaining wounds, and conduct a triage."

Vera paused to take stock of the progress report data streaming out of Jensen's prostheses. "Jensen's nervous system is interfacing quite well with the augmentations. Basic communications test results from the abdominal implants show no anomalies beyond those characteristic of the injuries sustained and some mild inflammation around the implants. Jensen's mind is, by all indications, still in a comatose state and there is evidence of significant damage. However, cognitive testing performed by the augments and MRI were able to identify the extent and neuropsychological functions affected, and his brain is in the early stages of offloading those processes into the RET1 chips we implanted."

"We can assume Jensen is sufficiently stable neurologically, then?"

"Yes," said Vera. "In addition, the abdominal implants are ready to regulate cardiovascular function. At the moment, a ventilator is regulating oxygen intake for safety reasons."

"You can confirm, then, Dr Marcovic, that the class IV augmentations are apparently capable of functioning normally and that there is no outstanding risk to the patient's cardiovascular or central nervous system?" The phrase was practically textbook, possibly with a shade of deadpan humor to it. There was certainly some smug relief radiating off of Yan at their success in stabilizing their patient.

"Yes."

Yan looked satisfied. "Good." She could practically see him looking up Jensen's chart through his iris HUD. He pointed out the various regions of Jensen's body he was referring to with his organic hands as he spoke; Vera couldn't tell whether he was still jacked into the autosurgeon or not. "Jensen's remaining abdominal injuries can heal themselves. Several cracked ribs, simple fractures; they'll heal themselves. Numerous soft tissue injuries not worth mentioning. I am concerned about damage to his digestive system and several glands, but there is no indication any of those need replacement." Yan cracked a thin smile in one corner of his mouth and glanced at Vera. "Unless our new engineering overlord disagrees?"

"Not at all, Yan," said David Sarif, as he walked in. Vera tensed, but said nothing. Yan jumped; he'd been looking away from the OR doors and hadn't realized David was there over the commotion from everyone else in the room. David looked around the room, evaluating, then put his hands on his hips and nodded once in impressed approval before he turned back to them. "Please go on, Doctor," he said.

Yan cleared his throat. The surgeons Vera had known were generally so unshakably calm that they could make it look like a psychosis, but he almost looked embarrassed. Vera chalked it up to stress. "As I was telling Doctor Marcovic, Jensen's major injuries have been dealt with for now. We do not believe there is any likelihood of further complications with his heart, lungs, or nervous system. I am vaguely concerned with potential internal bleeding and with damage to his remaining organs, although the smart clotting system in the synthetic blood we're giving him should be capable of handling that."

"We can regulate that with the augmentations, too," said David. "Part of the abdominal package was a system designed to regulate and enhance normal healing rates by managing the adrenal and lymphatic tissues."

Vera's eyes narrowed. "David. Are you telling us that in addition to the augments meant to replace cardiovascular and nervous function in Adam's abdomen, there are other augmentations which you implanted without our knowledge? Ones designed to have direct effect on his healing process?"

David made an acknowledgement gesture at her. "In one, Vera. It's codenamed Sentinel. It's a-"

The slap was so hard, Vera fancied her palm might have a bruise. David stumbled back, jaw hanging open in surprise. Despite what many of his devices could do, David himself was very unused to physical violence. "You do _not_," said Vera, enunciating every syllable with razor-sharp precision, "augment one of my patients with such a thing without informing me first."

David rubbed his jaw, and she could practically see the gears in his mind turning, re-evaluating, re-calculating. As discreetly as she could, Vera tried to shake some of the pain out of her hand. She became aware that most of the OR, including Yan, were staring at her.

"It's not active, obviously," growled David. "And it doesn't contain any potential biohazards. Just a choice mix of biomolecules and micro-electric shocks to regulate the healing process."

"I still want a brief on such devices before they are implanted. And I certainly want them added to my HUD. I can hardly do my job without that."

"There was hardly time before, Vera," said Yan. "This case hasn't been typical, and has certainly been the most frantic case of human augmentation that I have ever worked on. I doubt seriously that David could have briefed you quickly enough."

"What he said." David straightened his back and stretched his shoulders slightly. "Vera, I'm sorry that there hasn't been time for you to interface properly with these augmentations. They aren't on your HUD yet because I've got the power cut to everything but the bare essentials. They aren't even logging data or interfacing yet, not until you've had the chance to get acquainted with the software and what these things do. They won't affect Jensen until you say they will. "

"Well, David, we certainly have time now. Why don't you add them into my HUD before we go any further? I need to be able to observe all of the patient's augments to do my job, and we finally have time to do this properly."

"Fair enough, Vera. Give us a second, Yan." Without another word, David turned on his heel and headed out of the OR. Vera, presuming David needed a discreet conversation, followed him.

She was right about the conversation, but she hadn't realized there'd be so many forms to sign as well. David made a beeline for the pile of prosthesis boxes and interface systems and pulled a demure black briefcase from somewhere near the middle of the pile. He slid his thumb across the access catch and the case arched open on well-oiled hydraulic rails. Vera folded her arms and waited while he sorted through the paperwork he'd brought.

David found a moment to motion to the cheek where she'd hit him, hand filled with non-disclosure agreements. "Bit much, Vera. You mind keeping your hands to yourself?"

She shrugged. "I merely reacted as I normally would to engineering negligence. I have lost too many patients in experimental trials to... 'let things slide'?. You should know this. Yan knows this. I had thought you would want me to act normally, yes? Or perhaps imply some measure of hostility between us? Now that you have included me in your conspiracy, I mean. If Yan were to discover the extent to which I presume you have augmented Mr Jensen, he may react... badly."

David snorted. "Understatement." If he noticed the veiled threat he didn't react. He fished a pen out of a suitcase pocket and handed her the whole mess of legalese so that she could sign it. Vera flicked through it experimentally and then signed page after page of it. It wasn't really like she had much other choice, rather than walking out of the hospital right then and there.

When she handed the documents back to David, he looked up at her suddenly with a sly grin. "Felt good though, right?"

She couldn't hide her snort of laughter. David allowed the grin to dissolve into a small smile, and then his face drifted back into what was now his normal impassive mask. "Vera, there's a lot of technology in there. Those NDAs are serious things, all right? You can't unring this bell."

Vera just sighed. "Get on with it, David."

She could already feel the effects, though. David had been enabling the wireless feeds to her even as she spoke. A couple of mental switches flipped, and then it began.

It felt like a digital river pouring down into her, and for a moment she almost felt tugged away by the current. She stood there, eyes half closed, as the stream poured into her, earthing itself in the hard memory of her grey matter. Processor handles and header files near the surface stood out and glowed like phosphorescence to her conscious mind. The names flowed past her.

Sentinel RX.

Icarus.

Typhoon.

And those were just the big names. Beneath them, in the subsystem layers, lay an endless number of intricate augs that gleamed in the data stream like smoothly polished river stones. Vera could sense a power system far more intricate than anything she'd seen before, and countless pieces of interface and bus hardware meant to connect to future augmentations. They'd even reinforced sections of Jensen's ribcage, spine and pelvis in anticipation for prosthetic hardpoints.

Vera opened her eyes. David looked back with something caught between watchful caution and pride.

"Mother of God," whispered Vera, "David, what have you done?"

David regarded her a moment longer, then just turned on his heel and walked back into the OR. Vera followed, still trying to process the data coming in. Most of it was well beyond her engineering acumen, and there was simply no way she could understand the full function of Jensen's augmentations. That might even have been by design. She would be spending the project interfacing with them at the most abstracted level. Regrettable, but an increasingly common outcome as augmentation technology outraced the understanding of everyone but its creators.

Yan nodded at them both, and his eyes slid to Vera. "Are you satisfied, Doctor?"

Vera just nodded once.

"Good," said Yan. "As I was saying, I believe the next most urgent topic is the patient's left arm. The first responders used a tourniquet until he entered the hospital, and we had higher priorities for the last several hours. The risk of blood loss was far too high while he was being stabilized and I requested that it be kept tight enough to fully restrict blood flow."

Vera swore out a few taut syllables in Polish.

Yan's mouth tightened into a grimace. "Quite. There is already necrosis of the tissue near his fingers. As well, there is a significant number of fractures, and I suspect there is substantial arterial injury. The high risk of infection, even in here, from a superbug, could lead to severe consequences the amount of stress the patient is already under and the amount of tissue we have already removed."

"If we loosen that tourniquet," translated David, "he'll probably bleed out. And even if he doesn't, his body trying to heal it just might. But if we want to save the limb, we'd better do something."

"I suspect," said Yan, "that we are already out of time. I recommend we remove the limb entirely."

"That, we can do," said David. "I've got a replacement arm warmed up and waiting. All we have to do is remove the arm and install a hard point."

Yan tilted his head. "Which in turn is bolted onto the composite/ceramic reinforcements we added to his skeleton in the previous operation. Yes. I see how that could work."

Vera cleared her throat. "You already had this arm ready?"

David nodded once. "Couldn't be sure how much of Jensen would need replacing, in the end," he said. "I've got parts ready for pretty much everything."

Yan frowned. "So, if necessary, we can replace all of Jensen with a machine. How comforting. Tell me, Sarif, haven't you lost enough people today?"

"Replacements for his body, not his mind, not him," said David, a bit harshly. "Like I said, if you're ready for the operation then so am I."

"I am not," said Yan. "I had a long day in surgery before you called me in here, and as we've discussed, Jensen is now relatively stable. The nurses and the machines can do the rest, even bring us back in if anything changes. If we have the time, I think we could all benefit from four to five hours' sleep. It's 2 am now. I think we should begin again at 8 am tomorrow. There are some cots meant for nursing staff if any of you live more than several minutes away."

"Works for me," said David. He nodded once in friendly goodbye to Vera and then headed out. Vera had to check over the augs one last time, and Yan needed to check over Jensen's chart before he handed it over to the night shift.

It was a few minutes before Yan asked her, "Vera, tell me again, how is Jensen's body responding to the implants?"

It took her a moment to switch gears enough to communicate verbally. "Mild inflammation at most. It's lessening now."

Yan grunted. "Not typical."

"No."

Yan leaned over the table at Jensen's prone form. "We've been doing this for about a hundred years, now. The human body's response to implants and augmentations is consistently poor. It treats synthetic components as foreign bodies. It ramps up immune responses to the point that many implants can no longer function at all. We can barely manage the process with drugs. Even neuropozyne, with its endless list of side effects, is hailed as a miracle drug."

"It's certainly a strange response," said Vera, "but not entirely unheard of."

Yan almost seemed to ignore her. "How is Jensen even still alive? This procedure should have killed him. Did Sarif know this would happen? Was it just a desperate gamble?"

Vera stared at Yan, pondering. She'd worked with him once or twice before, and he had a reputation for calm and effective functionality that even amongst surgeons was impressive. He lived on the edge, to an extent; many of his operations were high-risk and on patients with effectively terminal conditions. It was why she'd picked him. But she knew about him more as a professional than as a person.

"And here I thought you weren't getting on so well with David Sarif."

Yan shrugged. "I don't like anyone who thinks they can buy me with money," he said. "Or my operating rooms. I assumed Sarif was just a rich desperate man who would fail. I assumed Jensen would perish. I was completely wrong."

Yan was silent a little longer, contemplating. "It's a remarkable result, frankly," he said finally. "This is a truly remarkable experiment."

"It is _not _an experiment."

"A lot of novel medical procedure is experiment, in my experience," said Yan. "We never know enough about how a patient will respond to any treatment to have any real certainty about what will happen. Often, in our desperation, we resort to potentially dangerous action. Drugs and surgical procedures untested beyond animal stock. But we must conduct such experiments if we are to find new ways that do work. Even if Sarif's motivations were not pure, his results will be. And collaboration always requires...compromise."

He turned to look at her, saw her expression. "But I ramble. My apologies. See you in the morning, Doctor Marcovic."

One of the nurses led her to a small room stuff with cots. Vera got into one almost entirely devoid of thought. Yan, her and David Sarif all flew back and forth through her head like devils around Jensen's body until they blended together and she drifted into sleep.


End file.
